The Small Party

by Lillian Beckwith

For Ruth and her three children their small island home is now a place of danger. An armed uprising has taken over and her husband is out to sea in his fishing boat. Escaping into the night, Ruth heads for Jeannie, her sister-in-law, but what she finds at Jeannie's farm shocks her. Somehow she has to get her children to safety and find her husband. It is a journey that will take up all her courage and determination.

Genres: Novels

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1991

About the author

Lilian Comber wrote fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children under the pseudonym Lillian Beckwith. She is best known for her series of comic novels based on her time living on a croft in the Scottish Hebrides.

Beckwith was born in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, in 1916, where her father ran a grocery shop. The shop provided the background for her memoir About My Father's Business, a child’s eye view of a 1920s family. She moved to the Isle of Skye with her husband in 1942, and began writing fiction after moving to the Isle of Man with her family twenty years later. She also completed a cookery book, Secrets from a Crofter’s Kitchen (Arrow, 1976).

Since her death, Beckwith’s novel A Shine of Rainbows has been made into a film starring Aidan Quinn and Connie Nielsen, which in 2009 won ‘Best Feature’ awards at the Heartland and Chicago Children’s Film Festivals.

Reviews

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this via audiobook from my library. I chose it because I thought it wouldn’t be too challenging, how wrong I was! What a fantastic book, it’s a thriller, an adventure,and a love story, it’s like Enid Blyton for grown ups. . I was there with Ruth and her three children every step of the way as they tried to find their way across the island and out of jeopardy. The audiobook is read beautifully by Hannah Gordon and I’d urge anyone who enjoys a well written adventure to read The Small Party.

[June Holmes · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is not a good recommendation for Beckwith's earlier and better works.

[Raz O'Xane · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretentious writing to show off vocabulary, uninteresting story, zero development, this was trash fodder at best.

[Meredith · Rating 1 out of 5]

If the plot of struggling to keep children safe in a trek through hostile territory appeals, read Pied Piper or A Town Like Alice. If you want a post-apocalyptic Britain, go for Day of the Triffids. If you want to read a good book by Lillian Beckwith, try The Hills is Lonely.

I found the characters poorly developed and the dialogue cliched.

The drunken bald irish eccentric was the most interesting person, relieving the monotony of the worn out inevitable plot. The lack of specificity regarding the location of the action, given only as an island off england, as well as the fuzzy information about why the rebellion was occuring or the dramatic change in government announced at the finale was annoying.

[Heidi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bit tense